15 Indian Inventions & Discoveries That Shaped the Modern World.

Indian Inventions & Discoveries

India was the mother of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s
languages. She was the mother of our philosophy, mother through the
Arabs, of much of our mathematics, mother through Buddha, of the ideals
embodied in Christianity, mother through village communities of
self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother
of us all.”

One of the oldest
civilizations in the world, the Indian civilization has a strong
tradition of science and technology. Ancient India was a land of sages
and seers as well as a land of scholars and scientists.

ancient Hindus had established a civilization, known as the Harappan
culture. A vast number of statements and materials presented in the
ancient Vedic literatures can be shown to agree with modern scientific
findings. Let’s explore the great cultural wealth of this knowledge...

1. Zero:

when India invented zero, the world learned to count. Yes, it's true!
Indians were the first to use Zero as a symbol and also in arithmetic
operations as well. In the earlier times, a blank space was used to
denote zero, later when it created confusion a dot was used to denote
zero which can also be founded in Bakhshali manuscript. In 500 AD circa,
Indian scientist Aryabhata gave a new symbol for zero (0). Aryabhatta
worked on the place value system and discovered zero for the very first
time, making use of letters to indicate numbers and pointing out
qualities. It was in India that the number system was discovered and
Aryabhata is credited with the invention of Zero!

Little needs to be written about the mathematical digit ‘zero’, one of
the most important inventions of all time. Mathematician Aryabhata was
the first person to create a symbol for zero and it was through his
efforts that mathematical operations like addition and subtraction
started using the digit, zero. The concept of zero and its integration
into the place-value system also enabled one to write numbers, no matter
how large, by using only ten symbols.

2. Democracy

Ruins of Vaishali (source)

The Greek republic of Athens is always regarded as the
oldest non-tribal, organized democracy in the world. But historians
know about the ancient Indian republic of Vaishali which dates back to
600 BCE, which is almost a hundred years before the institution of
Athenian democracy. But the modern-era colonial propaganda neglects this
fact.
Rather than that, the most ancient form of Indian
democracy is the “panchayat” system which dates back more than three
thousand years ago. It literally means “assembly of five”, whereby five
leaders combine to govern the society.
Thomas McEvilley says, ““Through such chronological
manipulations, the threat that the Indian past presents to the Greek
miracle [as postulated by European supremacists] is defused by
chronology.”
Will Durant says, “India was the mother of village communities of self-government and democracy.”

3. The Game of Chess

The game of chess was invented in India and was originally called
Ashtapada (sixty-four squares). "Ashtapada" Sanskrit for spider -"a
legendary being with eight legs" was played with dice on an 8x8
checkered board. There were no light and dark squares like we see in
today's chess board for 1,000 years. Other Indian boards included the
10×10 Dasapada and the 9×9 Saturankam. Later this game came to be known
as chaturanga. The Sanskrit name Chaturanga means 'quadripartite' — the
four angas (divided into four parts).

In 600 AD this game was learned by Persians who named it Shatranj.
Shatranj is a foreign word among the Persians and the Arabians, whereas
its natural derivation from the term Chaturanga is obvious. Again affix
the Arabic name for the bishop, means the elephant, derived from
alephhind, the Indian elephant. Even the word 'checkmate' is derived
from the Persian term Shah Mat which means 'the king is dead!’

4. Clothing the world:

Another revolutionary
Indian contribution was the development, production and use of cotton
textiles for clothing. The Ancient Greeks were initially not even
familiar with cotton, instead often wearing animal skins until the wars
of Alexander the Great, during which they discovered and started using
Indian garments, which essentially clothe all of us today.“Hundreds
of years before the Christian era, cotton textiles were woven in India
with matchless skill, and their use spread to the Mediterranean
countries.” The Columbia Encyclopedia.
For us in Britain, it
is important to be aware that one of the pillars of our wealth as a
modern nation, and a foundation of our industrial revolution, was
directly derived from knowledge and experience of high quality textiles
production and trade gained in India, as well as what many economic
historians argue was the deliberate dismantling of India’s pioneering
textiles industry. In his book The Political Economy of Imperialism, Dan
Nadudere states that “It was by destroying the Indian textile industry
that the British textile industry ever came up at all.”
For a
broader understanding of an India that few of us are aware of, I would
recommend watching the brilliant British historian Michael Wood’s The
Story of India.“If I were asked under what sky the human mind
has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply
pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I
should point to India.” Max Mueller.

5. Vedic roots of Mathematics

Did you know that
Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus and Algebra are studies which
originated in India? The word Geometry seems to have emerged from the
Sanskrit word gyaa-miti which means "measuring the Earth". And the word
Trigonometry is similar to tri-kona-miti meaning "measuring triangular
forms". The treatise of Surya Siddhanta describes details of
Trigonometry, which were introduced to Europe 1200 years later in the
16th century by Briggs. All Hindu as well as Buddhist mandalas and
yantras are complex forms of Geometrical shapes.

6. Water on the Moon:

One of Independent
India’s most notable contributions to modern space exploration occurred
between 2008 and 2009, with Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Space Research
Organisation’s (ISRO) first dedicated lunar mission.
ISRO’s Polar
Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) carried both ISRO and NASA instruments,
of which the Indian ‘Moon Impact Probe’ first detected the presence of
lunar water. This was achieved three months before NASA’s ‘Moon
Mineralogy Mapper’ (also part of Chandrayaan-1) made the same
breakthrough, to which the discovery of lunar water is often attributed.“We
want to thank ISRO for making the discovery possible. The moon till now
was thought to be a very dry surface with lot of rocks.” Jim Green,
NASA Director.

7. Rulers:

Rulers were made from Ivory and were in use
by the Indus Valley Civilization in what is today's Pakistan and
Northwestern India prior to 1500 BCE. Excavations at Lothal (2400 BCE)
have yielded one such ruler that calibrated to about 1/16 of an
inch—less than 2 millimetres and was it was 4400 years old. Even the
weights and measures of the Indus civilization reached far and wide to
Persia and Central Asia, where they were further modified. Later in
1851, Anton Ullrich invented the folding ruler while a few years later
in 1902, Frank Hunt made the flexible ruler.

8. Binary Numbers

Binary numbers is the basic language in which computer programs are
written. Binary basically refers to a set of two numbers, 1 and 0,
the combinations of which are called bits and bytes. The binary number
system was first described by the Vedic scholar Pingala, in his book Chandahśāstra, which is the earliest known Sanskrit treatise on prosody ( the study of poetic metres and verse).

9. Squat toilet or Flush toilets:

Ancient toilets that used water were used in the Indus Valley
Civilization. The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro had a flush toilet
system in almost every house in place, attached to a sophisticated
sewage system from the 3rd millennium B.C. The sanitation devices were
first of its kind and the Indus Valley Civilization contains what is the
world's earliest known system of flush toilets. The houses during the
Indus Valley had a washing platform and a dedicated toilet or a waste
disposal hole. The toilet holes were flushed by emptying a jar of water,
drawn from the house's central well, through a clay brick pipe, and
into a shared brick drain, that would feed into an adjacent soak pit
(cesspit). The soak pits would be periodically emptied of their solid
matter, possibly to be used as a fertiliser.

10. Wireless Communication/Microwave communication:

For a
long time Guglielmo Marconi has been credited as the inventor of
wireless radio communication. Marconi received the 1909 Nobel Prize in
Physics for contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.
But... the first public demonstration of the use of radio waves for
communication was made by the renowned Indian scientist, Jagadish
Chandra Bose. Bose first demonstrated the use of radio in Calcutta, back
in 1895, two years before a similar demonstration was made by Marconi
in England. This revolutionary demonstration by Bose formed the
foundation of the technology used in mobile telephony, radars, satellite
communication, radios, television broadcast, WiFi, remote controls and
countless other applications that today play a central role in our daily
lives. The crescograph which is a device for measuring growth in plants
was also invented by the Bengali scientist Jagadish Bose in the early
20th century.

11. A Theory of Atom

One of the notable scientists of the ancient India wasKanad who is said to have devised the atomic theory centuries before John Dalton was born. He speculated the existence of anu or a small indestructible particles, much like an atom. He also stated that anu
can have two states — absolute rest and a state of motion. He further
held that atoms of same substance combined with each other in a specific
and synchronized manner to produce dvyanuka (diatomic molecules) and tryanuka (triatomic molecules).

12. Carburized Steel

India
is supposedly one of the pioneers in metallurgy and had been producing
top quality steel way back, two thousand years back than the time when
Michael Faraday demystified the real process. The Indian Wootz Steel is
considered to be legendary, and many great civilizations – from Ancient
Greece to Persia, from Arabia to Ancient Rome – were so astonished by
it. Even King Porus selected it as a gift to offer Alexander the Great,
instead of picking the common gold and silver.
High-quality steel is still a major raw material in
the modern world of production and industries. After the independence,
India has again become the world leader in metallurgy and production of
high-quality steel.

13. The Heliocentric Theory

Mathematicians of ancient India often applied their mathematical
knowledge to make accurate astronomical predictions. The most
significant among them was Aryabhatta whose book, Aryabhatiya,
represented the pinnacle of astronomical knowledge at the time. He
correctly propounded that the Earth is round, rotates on its own axis
and revolves around the Sun i.e the heliocentric theory. He also made
predictions about the solar and lunar eclipses, duration of the day as
well as the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

14. Seamless Metal Globe

Considered one of the most remarkable feats in metallurgy, the first
seamless celestial globe was made in Kashmir by Ali Kashmiri ibn Luqman
in the reign of the Emperor Akbar. In a major feat in metallurgy, Mughal
metallurgists pioneered the method of lost-wax casting to make twenty
other globe masterpieces in the reign of the Mughal Empire.Before
these globes were rediscovered in the 1980s, modern metallurgists
believed that it was technically impossible to produce metal globes
without any seams, even with modern technology.

15. Plastic Surgery

Photo Source

Written by Sushruta in 6th Century BC, Sushruta Samhita
is considered to be one of the most comprehensive textbooks on ancient
surgery. The text mentions various illnesses, plants, preparations and
cures along with complex techniques of plastic surgery. The Sushruta Samhita ’s most well-known contribution to plastic surgery is the reconstruction of the nose, known also as rhinoplasty